Microsoft Image Composer Composing Images for the Web Forrest Stroud
Microsoft Image Composer is a new Web graphics app for Windows 95/98 designed to work in standalone fashion or as a complement to the award-winning FrontPage 98 Web site builder. With more than 500 cool tools and image effects, Image Composer competes with the likes of Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop and manages to hold its own. While Microsoft's client will help you create images from scratch, the two clients listed above are often better suited for this purpose.
Rather, it's manipulating existing graphics for Web use that is Image Composer's forté -- special effects, warps and filters, masks, patterns, button and icon creation and editing wizards, text object editors, color tuning, and tons of similar tools can be applied to give your basically boring and blazé graphics a stunning and wildly appealing new look. Image Composer gives you the ability to add pizzazz to your graphics with specific effects ranging from gradient fills to impressionist filters to radial sweep warps and more. And now that the companion program Microsoft GIF Animator is built into the client, Image Composer will also help you create animated multi-frame graphics for use on your Web site.
Arranging multiple images into one single-frame mosaic is equally easy, thanks to Microsoft's innovative and amazing 'images with shape' technology. Images with shape, or sprites, feature built-in transparency which allows you to customize, arrange, and resize graphics on-the-fly. Additionally, sprites offer the advantage of layering, which allows you to overlay graphics, or place multiple graphics on top of each other, without having to worry about covering up part of the graphic underneath due to the 'rectangle effect'.
The 'rectangle effect' occurs when a graphic, regardless of its specific shape, is saved to file as a rectangular image. A background color fills up the space left by the graphic to give the saved image its rectangular shape, which effectively makes it impossible to layer the image on top of another. Only Photoshop offers similar technology with its layering capabilities, but even Photoshop lacks the ability to do on-the-fly graphic resizing without a noticeable loss in graphic integrity.
Image Composer doesn't support the vast array of graphics types that the top clients do, but it does handle GIFs (including transparent and interlacing options), JPEGs (although no support for Progressive JPEGs as of yet), BMPs, PNGs, MIXs, FPXs, Photoshop PSDs, Tiff TIFs, Targa TGAs, and its own proprietary MIC image protocol. Quite simply, this is a graphics app designed specifically for Webmasters, and its awesome tandem of tools and technology are more than up to the task. If you do any type of Web publishing, this is definitely an app worth checking out.
Pros: Images with shape technology, 500 tools and image effects, excellent app for Webmasters
Cons: Lacks internal animated GIF support, primarily of use only for Web site developers
